Numbering exhibits to a witness statement
Exhibits are cited by label, so the label has to be on the page and identical everywhere it appears. Do it without putting the client’s documents through a conversion service.
Agree the convention before you stamp anything
Firms differ: some use a running label for the statement (AB1, AB2, AB3), others a document reference with page suffixes. What matters is that the label in the statement, the label on the exhibit and the label in the bundle index are the same string. Deciding that after stamping twenty pages means stamping them again.
For a single exhibit, a diagonal EXHIBIT stamp at low opacity identifies the page without obscuring the text underneath. For a run of exhibits, the label itself belongs at the top of the first page.
Two passes: stamp, then paginate
Stamp the label first and paginate second. If you paginate first and stamp afterwards, the stamp is applied to an already-numbered file and the numbers move with the pages — which is fine — but you lose the chance to check the sequence against the index while it is still easy to fix.
Paginating the exhibits as one file, rather than each exhibit separately, is what produces the continuous run that a bundle index expects.
What the tool will not do
It does not insert exhibit separator sheets, generate an index, or renumber existing stamps — a page can end up with two labels if you stamp it twice with different text. Where an exhibit has been re-labelled, it is usually faster to start from the original file than to try to remove the old stamp.
Can I apply the stamp to only the first page of an exhibit?+
Not yet — the watermark applies to every page of the file. Split the first page out, stamp it, then merge it back if the label should only appear once.
Will the stamp obscure the text underneath?+
At the default 18% opacity it does not: the text stays readable, and the page remains searchable because the stamp is drawn over the existing content rather than replacing it.
Are the exhibits uploaded?+
No. Both the stamp and the numbering happen in the browser tab.
Files are processed in the browser tab and are never uploaded. Slate is not legal advice or a case management system.